Last week I built some RSS consuming pieces for AspAlliance.com. I decided late in the week that I wanted to go ahead and add a listing of blog entries made by any AspAlliance Author, but although I had all the code to merge the many RSS feeds, I didn’t have a handy way to do so in an async fashion (that is, without causing a page to time out whenever the time came to go load up dozens of separate RSS feeds and process them). The simplest solution I could come up with was to write a tiny console app that included the merge code, have it write the resulting merged feed to a database, and alter the controls on the site to bind to the database’s version. Throw the EXE into the task scheduler to have it run every 4 hours or so, and voila, that did the trick.
Also made some more minor layout changes to maximize the use of “above-the-fold” space, especially on the home page.